Jay Lillie

I should tell you about my friend Charlie. His doctors gave him the verdict – he had six months to live. He sat down with his favorite brew one night, and thought about what he’d do with the rest of his life.

Charlie had a good job and money in the bank that he was saving for his retirement. He quit his job, sold his Manhattan apartment, made accommodation for an ex-wife and adult daughter, and bought a 42-foot sailboat in Maine. It took him a month to get it fitted out for voyaging, and then he took off alone and headed south along the coast. I asked him to keep me informed of his progress.

He hit a vicious nor’easter about half way to Boston and spent 36 hours in heavy seas and very cold weather, but he survived. His sloop was damaged enough that he put into a yard in Marblehead, MA to make repairs. He called me from there.

“The waves were incredibly high and steep, and they were traveling at me like a big freight train. I couldn’t heave–to in those conditions, and stayed up all night at the wheel. When I couldn’t do it any longer, I battened down and tied myself into my bunk. At some point I fell asleep and when I woke up the sea was still rough, but the sun was shining.”

“Scary.”

“You know what . . . it was liberating,” he said. “Hell, I’m dying anyway so what difference did it make. It was amazing to be lying there in my bunk in those conditions and not be afraid. Hell, I used to be afraid I wouldn’t hit my golf ball.”

“If you weren’t paralyzed with fear what were you thinking about?”

“I listened and watched clinically as the boat and all its parts struggled to survive. You couldn’t see the waves in the dark, but you could hear them coming. I can’t explain why we didn’t roll over and go down.”

“Were you ever sorry you left port?”

“I don’t think so. The irony is that that storm made a new man out of me. Maybe God made it a test to get me on the right track. I can’t tell you how great it felt not to be afraid.”

“So where do you go from here?” I asked him.

“I’m going to hit all the places I’ve always wanted to see.”

“Anything I can do?”

“Yes. Don’t tell anyone that I’ve been given what’s left of my six months. That would spoil everything.”

“Okay,” I said.

Charlie outlived the six months. When he finally lost the strength to sail the boat that was part of him, he moored it in the Bay outside his hospice window and sailed it in his mind, reliving his voyage half way around the world, before setting sail alone on his last voyage.

I didn’t tell anyone he’d been given a time line for death. Of course we’re all dying. Maybe we should take a page from Charlie’s book and stop worrying . . . at least about things we can’t control.

His nose twitched and he wickedly winked at me. “Come on Big Boy, give it up.”

How much?

“What you got?”

Twenty Five cents. Will that do it?

“What you think, Big Boy?”

I don’t know. I’m from Missouri.

“You certainly are not from Missouri. You from D.C., Big Boy.”

Okay, so how much?

“All the Kings Horses, and all his woooo-men.”

I don’t have any horses.

“You got no woooo-men either, Big Boy.”

So what do you want from me?

“A license.”

To do what?

“Anything and everything: To spend your money; make you pay and pay; mortgage your children’s lives; give my friends what they want; buy your vote; send you packing; tie your hands; and bury you on the lone prairie.

Not much room in there for what I might want. I thought you were on my side.

“What side be that?”

Aren’t we on the same side here? It’s all one country.

“You don’t really believe that, do you?”

Who do you think you are, anyway?

“Exactly. Just check your vote at the door, and get the HELL out of here.”

No. I’m not giving you my vote, and you’re the one who’ll be leaving.

“You can’t get rid of me. I’m in the details.”

I should have known . . . the devil’s always in the details.

I’m in a good mood today. A dear old friend of mine sent me a video recording off Blogger featuring the Mormon Tabernacle Choir in Salt Lake City with Andrea Bocelli singing The Lords Prayer. It will make your day.

There’s lots to worry about . . . if you’re a worryer or out of a job. I’m not either, but I’ve been on the beach a couple of times in my life. It always happens at the worst times. When you’ve a large family to feed or children about to enter or wishing to stay in college.

A client and friend of mine thinks we need to have more recessions and less severe ones. That way we can get used to it and avoid being paralyzed with fear. I don’t know more than one person who thinks the government is going about helping create jobs in the right way. We don’t seem to learn anything from history. One other friend even thinks it’s all on purpose what the Congress and White House are doing. He says they want it to drag out so they can move the country into a more subsidizing mode. He goes back to Chief of Staff Emanuel’s comment early on that you can’t afford to waste a good crisis (i.e., when people are more likely to go along with extreme measures). And it would appear they’re trying their best not to waste this one.

I watched the Wall Streeters lose their money and their jobs when I was back in the Navy and later in law school. I watched it happen again when I was a bonafide big shit lawyer in Manhattan. Those guys made a lot more money when times were good, but many were on the beach when the economy turned down. It made me realize it’s primarily you and I who are in charge – not the market and definitely not the government.

My client friend and I imagined what each of us might do today if we were on the beach. We both said the same thing . . . go do what we know people need and do it well enough to make it into a business. I said I can still mow lawns, and he’d clean houses and stores. We’d get through, and who knows what might come out of it.

As it is he and I are making it swimming upstream and accomplishing little things that according to the popular notion are not available any more. Showing is always better than telling – so anyone who wants to see what he and I are doing drop me a note or go on my Facebook page and I’ll give you a first hand look.

This is the first openly critical appraisal from this corner on the intentions of Barack Obama. This is not about errors or omissions. I’m talking about a man’s intentions.

A few cats came out of the bag during the President’s so-called bipartisan meeting on Thursday. Up to now Obama’s been working in that verbal closet he told Harry Reid about when he first came into the Senate: “I have this talent,” he reportedly said to Reid, and since that date has proven that indeed he does. Barack Obama does not blush or even hesitate when he makes two diametrically opposed statements to a mixed or general audience, giving each of two or more opposing views something to like and hang on to. But last Thursday he let the cat out of the bag . . . I was elected to change this nation radically and everlastingly, and this is what I’m going to do whether you or anyone else likes it or not.

He may actually believe he was elected to put in place a socialist welfare state or at least to move all important decision making from individual to governmental hands. This could even be what some of those who voted for him intended, but I doubt many of the independents, who are the voters who elect all our Presidents, understood they were electing him to accomplish this radical a change.

We can’t even say we deserved what we got, because the truth is we didn’t know much about Barack Obama beyond his silver-tongued oratory. Or maybe we didn’t care, since so many of us were, as usual, voting against something . . . and not for Obama or for anything else so specific as a policy of redistributing the wealth through massive and unsustainable public expenditures that can only be met by raising taxes to economy killing levels.

Whatever our wisdom in hindsight might be, the fact is we put him there and he’s going to make the most of what he personally came into politics to accomplish . . . right all the wrongs he witnessed when he was a community organizer on Chicago’s Southside.

I’ve been hoping for a year that he’d tackle the issues of the needy in a more transparent, enlightened, and centrist manner . . . near to where most of the rest of us fair-minded Americans pitch our tents. That hasn’t happened, and on Thursday he slipped and told us it’s not going to happen.

We’ll see if this talent he has . . . to convince us he believes one thing while doing quite another . . . is sufficient to let him continue to swim upstream against a rising current of mistrust. It’s hard to fool all the people all the time . . . even with all that talent.

There are four women in my new novel,  JUSTICE . . . five if you include the President, but her role is mostly behind the scenes. The most interesting may be the character of Mari. She comes to New Orleans from the Island of Martinique in 1959 at age 20 to work in the home of one of the politically powerful families there. She’s remarkably beautiful, and has a presence that for several years enables her to rise above the issues facing a black woman in the South in the 1950’s. Her daughter, Joan, has some of those same qualities, and goes on to become a successful trial lawyer in Washington, while Mari insists on lying-low in Chicago’s Southside. Mari lives for, and vicariously through, her daughter. When Joan is chosen as the President’s choice to fill a vacancy on the Supreme Court, Mari’s past comes back to haunt them both. I freed myself of any restraints and let it all hang out when Joan goes back to New Orleans to confront her mother’s employer.

Julia Gold is an interesting, very modern, woman, and the person in the Homicide Division of the Chicago Police Department with responsibility to solve the murder of a young journalist. She’s up against the usual factual issues present in solving any murder, but she also has to battle City Hall to solve the crime. She’s living evidence of a saying I first heard Law School . . . it’s better to be lucky than smart. Julia has both going for her.

The fourth would be Kate, who travels with me from Havana Passage, along with her fiancée, Gordon Cox. Kate’s character is the bridge between the three critical points of the plot . . . Julia in Chicago, Gordon’s doings with the White House, and the Supreme Court where Kate is a law clerk to the Justice who’s retiring. She also knew the murdered journalist, and is driven to solve the real mystery of his death.

I kept the same White House we saw in Havana Passage. I want to avoid appearing to have a political agenda. Havana Passage came out during the Bush years and this is now. I had fun taking Joan through the Senate confirmation process.

The release date for the mystery, JUSTICE, has been pushed back to late summer. So many books are being printed these days it’s hard to get a place in the queue. The trouble is not many of these are selling very well, so the name of the game becomes promote, promote, promote. We now have six months to do that. I like simple, straightforward, ways of doing things, so what I’m going to do with all this time is to drive you crazy.

I’m a practicing lawyer who writes mystery suspense novels with a political twist. I labor under the impression that I can do this, because my background material comes from real world experiences helping real clients around the globe . . . plus, my mother always said I had a good imagination.

I sit in a dingy bar in Djakarta, Indonesia with an explorer who has discovered new microbes under the ice in Tibet. This guy is a born hero for some exciting fiction, I tell myself. It’s not just because he’s an explorer working in far off places, it’s because he’s also 6’8”, 350 pounds, and off-the-wall brilliant.

I’m sent from New York to bail an American expatriate businessman out of jail in Caracas, Venezuela. I find the jail he’s in is a dungeon . . . a real dungeon, like the ones we see in the old movies . . . down three levels into a dark, dank, cave, with heavy, creaking steel cages and rats running around. Nooooo, you say . . . that can’t be . . . not in Caracas, Venezuela. Oh Yes, and his crime, if you can imagine it, was questioning the honesty of a government servant. We get him out after a while using good local lawyers . . . not the U.S. Embassy, which don’t want to be associated with him or us. It’s another experience shaping what goes into my fiction. Venezuela looms large in my still-in-progress book and the State Department sits over in the corner in all of them.

I love Tolstoy’s War and Peace, where he shows the generals making decisions based on the view they have of the battlefield in a given moment only to find the situation has changed by the time the orders get to the soldiers in the field. It’s the same with decisions and policies formulated in corporate headquarters or in the White House. By the time they get through the labyrinth of compromise and debate, their commands are outdated to the point of being useless or counter productive. I’ve been at both ends of that chain.

JUSTICE is an individual to get to know as well as a mystery to solve. You can’t do one without the other. It’s both easier than first appears and more demanding than imagined. I’m sorry you have to wait until late summer to read it.

“I can’t wait,” Helen said, “to see that wonderful man from Massachusetts sitting there in the House, upstaging the President giving his State of the Union speech. Do you think the T.V. cameras will zoom in on his family in the balcony?”

“But, Helen,” Tom said, “your man from Reston, MA will not be there. He hasn’t been sworn in yet.”

“Is that true?”

“Afraid so. Did you really think the Democrats would let Brown steal Obama’s big night?”

Helen looked devastated. “I’ve been looking forward to this upstaging of Nancy Pelosi and crowd ever since Scott Brown won the Seat.”

“You’re right about where the T.V. cameras would be focusing, and I don’t think Obama’s White House could let that happen, especially with Brown’s attractive family sharing the limelight with Obama’s.”

“So, will the temporary fill-in senator be there?”

“That’s a very good question. I guess so.”

“That could focus attention on the suppressed absence of Senator Scott Brown.”

“My guess is Obama is not going to worry about that.”

“Well, I’m not going to watch him. I might put my foot through the T.V. tube the first time Pelosi jumps up like she did at his inauguration speech.”   

My friend Bernie was holding forth in the local java shop. We all like Bernie, but sometimes he gets the bit between his teeth and you can’t slow him down.

“I have to hand it to Obama. He’s managed to turn the office of the Presidency into a whistle stop on the campaign trail.”

“Maybe that’s the way it’s done in Chicago,” someone said.

Bernie laughed derisively. “I don’t think so. Those guys, Axelrod and Emanuel, are running the White House. They probably just want him out of their way . . . so they send him out on Air Force One with his teleprompter in hand to schmooze the folks.”

“He’s a good communicator,” I said.

“When he has the teleprompter.”

“He’s hard to embarrass,” Harry added, as if the thought suddenly occurred to him.

“Boy, you’ve got that right,” Bernie said. “His excuse for the upset in Massachusetts was that he’d not been out enough talking to the “American People”. I ask you, what day in the last year was he not out doing that?”

“When did you climb off his bandwagon, Bernie?” friend Judd asked, with a sly smile pasted across his face.

“I voted for him. You’re right about that, Judd. But I think, like most people, I tend to vote “against” rather than “for”.

“So what did his election accomplish?” Judd said.

“Well . . . for one thing . . . it convinced the Chicago crowd that we’re all as stupid as they thought we were. They think we bought into their whole program, and all they have to do is send Obama out there with his teleprompter to keep charming us to death. I mean you can’t turn on your television without seeing him there playing this role.”

“It got him elected,” I said.

“I know, but it’s starting to turn people off now. Even the Europeans are jumping ship.”

“I thought it was Congress we had to worry about,” Judd said, referring to a previous discussion we’d had with Bernie.”

“You’re right,” Bernie said, “and I thought I was wrong about that too, until I saw that clown Chuck Shumer up there on the podium yesterday. I agree that those guys are still a huge problem. All the more reason we need a working President in the White House.”

“Maybe if he gets rid of Emanuel and Axelrod . . .”

“Ha, that’s unlikely. They found him, they groomed him, they sent him to the Senate, and they steered him into the Presidency. He’s their man . . . not the other way around.”

My agent called to say he’d been asked by a “friend of the White House” to get me to reconsider the plot of my new book, JUSTICE, scheduled for release in late Spring.

“By “friends” do you include the President?” I asked him.

“No, it’s more like the powers behind the throne.”

“Like who?” I asked.

“The higher-ups. You know how it works. You wrote all about it in your last novel.”

“The White House Chief of Staff . . . ?”

“Well . . . the Chicago crowd.”

“What do they want me to change?”

“Have the reporter murdered somewhere else. Take the story out of Chicago.”

“That’s ridiculous. Besides, most of the story takes place in Washington.”

“Exactly. It’s the juxtaposition of Capitol Hill and the Southside that bugs them.”

“But that’s what makes the plot so compelling.”

“Sure, but you don’t understand. They’re used to doing the compelling in Chicago AND Washington.”

“JUSTICE is the best book I’ve written.”

“That’s what worries them. They liked HAVANA PASSAGE.”

“Because they weren’t in the White House when it came out?!    

“You’re catching on, Big Boy.”